History of Computers: It all began in 1969 with the famous "little-used PDP-7 in the corner" at the Bell Laboratories.  Ken Thompson and others started programming UNIX in assembly language and in B, which was developed by Thompson. They were soon joined by Dennis Ritchie, better known as the R in K&R C.

One might say that Multics, an other OS, was the parent of UNIX. Multics had a strong influence on UNIX, not only because Thompson and Ritchie worked on this project before. Even the name UNIX is a pun on Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Sytem). Unix was at first written as Unics (Uniplexed Information and Computing System).

In 1971 the first version of UNIX was launched. It was also called V1. Like all further releases of the Bell Labs, it was identified by the current edition number of the UNIX Programmer's Manual.

This version was used for text processing and ran on a PDP-11/20.